Inspiring and reassuring this viewer still... 
How did he do it? Coming on sixty years ago, a Frenchman wrote a story, rooted in 18th- an 19th-century farce but focused on the then threatening landscape of interwar European bourgeois society, and filmed it. The production features what is now called an ensemble cast and is mostly talky, with a only few scenes of mild action -- a rabbit hunt, a climactic shooting, and also a pillow fight and an amateurs' stage show. But somehow, through its words, its dramatic convolutions, its all-seeing camera, and its insistence, made explicit, that we all have our reasons for both the noble and the inane things that we do, those recorded sounds and flickering shadows convey a moving warmth and indomitable hope for even the darkest of times. Part of that triumph arises from the magic of cinema itself. It's from the lambent depths of THE RULES OF THE GAME (LA REGLE DU JEU), though, that layer upon layer of elemental humanity emerge, inspiring and reassuring this viewer still. Merci, Jean Renoir.

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